Caity Weaver

Many comedians could really be such a nice young man if they'd only cut it out with the dirty talk and the swears.

American comedy bible the Wall Street Journal ran a story written by everyone's mothers Thursday, advising up-and-coming comics that if they want to make it big in this business we call show, they've got to cut it out with the dirty talk that no one wants to hear anyway, so why don't they talk about something nice for a change?

Instead of talking about a one night stand, you can talk about a time you took a standardized test.

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Instead of talking about your hairy balls, you can talk about a small velvet sack of marbles.

Instead of dropping f-bombs, you can stare wordlessly out at your audience.

Etc.

While the advice of the professional comedians in the piece is certainly solid (No one fucking wants to talk to a cockface who can't say two goddamn words without shit cock bootylicious ass; family-friendly and corporate gigs can pay $10,000, while comedy club performers earn in the tens of dollars), it is hampered by the fact that it appears to have been written by your second grade teacher back in the 1940s.

For example, offensive words aren't given the standard dash m—-s, or transcribed as [expletive]s, which preserves the words' spicy nature by letting readers' imaginations run wild through the dense woods of Curse Forest. Instead, salty sailor talk is described as "[something]" or, worse "[something worse]."

Then there's this opener:

Aspiring stand-up comedians often think that making people laugh requires a foul mouth. Could be, but most of them won't earn a cent at it if they can't clean up their acts.

By far, though, the most uncomfortable scenes in the article are those involving a band of stumbling amateur comics, who have paid $50 a person to have their sets critiqued by an expert.

The performers must constantly be prompted to clap for one another. The group consists of "a mortician, an Orthodox Jew, an Indian Catholic, [and] a woman getting divorced"; a quality joke set-up that, disappointingly, goes nowhere. Everyone is taking notes with a pen.